Report: New revelations about campus IT trends

Survey provides a national snapshot of campus IT spending, cloud tech, and outlook for the future

Almost one in every five dollars spent on campus IT investments are made outside of centralized IT; in other words, almost $4 billion is spent in non-managed, non-measured, and redundant IT spending each year on campus technology.

This is just one of many illuminating findings of a recent MeriTalk survey—sponsored by VMware and Carahsoft—of over 150 IT professionals at public and private institutions across the U.S.

Other findings include those about department communication, centralizing solutions, the use of cloud technology, and the trends IT leaders believe will be important to invest in now for the future.

“What steps are colleges and universities taking to eliminate IT silos, deliver increased IT control, and empower users (students, faculty, administration) with flexibility and agility; and how is the cloud helping?” are all questions MeriTalk aimed to answer through its survey, administered this past June (2014).

According to the survey, the size of the higher education cloud market is huge [$4.4 billion]; yet, higher education IT pros estimate that 18 percent of their IT systems are redundant.

At the same time, institutions are struggling to keep up with growing IT requirements, which respondents say are due to the increased use of mobile devices and mobility requirements (61 percent), an increase in diversity of IT needs among end users (57 percent), and an increased number of applications (50 percent).

Also, 82 percent of IT executives surveyed say their network is more complex today than even two years ago, and there is no additional IT budget to support these new requirements.

As institutions turn to the cloud, their IT leaders give current deployments “mixed grades,” says MeriTalk. When asked to rate their satisfaction with services they have deployed using a cloud model, 69 percent were satisfied with their LMS, 67 percent with their blended learning environments, 54 percent with their MOOCs, and 47 percent with their OERs.